This invention relates generally to devices for detecting power line disturbances and more particularly relates to devices for analyzing transient voltages and currents in power supplied to critical electronic equipment.
As the use of computers and other critically sensitive electronic equipment comes more and more into use, a need for detecting and eliminating power line disturbances such as transient voltages and currents has been shown. Presently, devices for detecting disturbances and transients are of the type which shut down the equipment to prevent damage and provide no information as to the origin of the disturbance. For example, computers frequently have overload protecting devices which will shut down the equipment to protect the electronic circuitry and the memory data banks. However, if the source of the transient is not discovered, frequent recurrence can result in considerable down time, resulting in costly operation of the electronic equipment. The very nature of transients (i.e., occuring infrequently) makes it difficult to determine their origin.
It has been established that electrical power in supplying critical equipment have various types of random impulse voltage transients. These transients can cause numerous problems to critical loads such as operational failures, physical damage, errors in computer printouts, etc. Numerous devices are available to establish that impulse voltage transients are occurring, such as the power line monitoring equipment that detects and records these transients so that a correlation can be made with equipment failures, which is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 3,813,667 of M. Smith, who is one of the co-inventors in this invention. However, no known method was available to determine the source of the majority of these random type transients. It was also suspected that many impulse voltage transients are generated by the critical loads. A need, therefore, existed to determine the source of these transients. This need resulted in the development of the Transient Direction Detector of Patent Application Ser. No. 542,478 filed on Jan. 20, 1975 by K. T. Huang, who is a co-inventor in this invention. This invention is an improved version of the Transient Direction Detector of the patent application mentioned above.